Tuesday, 9 March 2010

Lecture Seven: Trash

Trash has traditionally been seen as the unnecessary by-product of progress: the further we advance, the more trash we generate. Green strategies in design, together with the use of recycled materials have become commonplace in recent years. But what about the discarded trash of our popular culture? Not only are old images, themes and footage recycled in communication design but an entire trash aesthetics has come into being – classic ‘kustom kar’ pinstriping, tattoo ‘flash art’, tiki art, musical exotica, pulp fiction, burlesque bump and grind and Z-grade movies have all provided a refuge for designers tired of the banalities of a mainstream culture increasingly run by multinational media corporations. When large banking concerns like HSBC start boasting that ‘understanding culture is our business’, how completely do you now want to be misunderstood? Run (don’t walk) to the nearest exit.

Embedded YouTube trash bonanza (from the bottom up): Vintage Luchra Libra images from Mexico (give it a minute or two); Von Dutch, who paints a straighter line drunk than you ever could sober, talks about the origins of pinstriping with Big Daddy Roth; Martin Denny on ‘Hawaii Calls’; plus Maria Montez proves she’s the Queen of Technicolor in this scene from the 1944 film Cobra Woman

About Me

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of journals and publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor, Frieze, Blast and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents, London Noir and Krautrock. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman as ‘a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction, mind-bending reading’. He has written and presented critically acclaimed programmes for BBC Radio 3, Radio 4, Resonance FM, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. Ken is the author of Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century 1947-1959, available from Strange Attractor Press in the UK and North Atlantic Books in the US. His new book 'The Bright Labyrinth' is now available from Strange Attractor Press.